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Apollo with the tortoise-shell
lyre, on a 5th-century BC drinking
cup (kylix)

The music of ancient Greece was almost
universally present in society, from marriages and funerals to
religious ceremonies, staged dramas, folk music and the ballad-like
reciting of epic poetry. It thus played an integral role in the
lives of ancient Greeks. There
are significant fragments of actual Greek musical notation[1][2] as well
as many literary references to ancient Greek music, such that some
things can be known—or reasonably surmised—about what the music
sounded like, the general role of music in society, the economics
of music, the importance of a professional caste of musicians, etc.
Even archaeological remains reveal an abundance of depictions on
ceramics, for example, of music being performed. The word
music comes from the muses, the daughters of Zeus and patron goddesses of creative and
intellectual endeavours.

The difference
between music and philosophy

Pythagoras

It is common to hear the term "music of the spheres" and read of Pythagoras and his
school, who laid the foundations of our knowledge of the study of
harmonics—how strings and columns of air
vibrate, how they produce overtones, how the overtones are related
arithmetically to one another, etc.

It is important to note that the entire study of such things by
the Greeks was less a formula for the production of playable music
than it was a mathematical and philosophical description of how the
universe, in general, was perceived to be constructed—the stars,
the sun, the planets, all vibrating in harmony.

What
the music sounded like

Our music was once divided into its proper forms...It was not
permitted to exchange the melodic styles of these established forms
and others. Knowledge and informed judgment penalized disobedience.
There were no whistles, unmusical mob-noises, or clapping for
applause. The rule was to listen silently and learn; boys,
teachers, and the crowd were kept in order by threat of the stick.
. . . But later, an unmusical anarchy was led by poets who had
natural talent, but were ignorant of the laws of music...Through
foolishness they deceived themselves into thinking that there was
no right or wrong way in music, that it was to be judged good or
bad by the pleasure it gave. By their works and their theories they
infected the masses with the presumption to think themselves
adequate judges. So our theatres, once silent, grew vocal, and
aristocracy of music gave way to a pernicious theatrocracy...the
criterion was not music, but a reputation for promiscuous
cleverness and a spirit of law-breaking.[3]

Photograph of the original stone at Delphi containing the second of
the two hymns to Apollo. The music notation is the line of
occasional symbols above the main, uninterrupted line of Greek
lettering.

From his references to "established forms" and "laws of music"
we can assume that at least some of the formality of the
Pythagorean system of harmonics and consonance had taken hold of
Greek music, at least as it was performed by professional musicians
in public, and that Plato was complaining about the falling away
from such principles into a "spirit of law-breaking". Among the
lawbreakers would certainly be Aristoxenus, who held that the notes of the
scale are to be judged, not as the Pythagoreans held, by
mathematical ratio, but by the ear. Aristoxenus said, essentially,
that since you can't hear the "music of the spheres", anyway, why
not just sing and play what sounds good and reasonable to us? That
simple philosophy underlay the entire later movement to tempered
scales and even bears comparison to the divide in 20th-century
music between tonal music and atonal music.

Playing what "sounded good" violated the proper use of the
established ethos of
modes that had developed by the time of Plato. That is, the Greeks
had developed a complex system of relating particular emotional and
spiritual characteristics to certain modes (scales). The
names for the various modes derived from the names of Greek tribes
and peoples, the temperament and emotions of which were said to be
characterized by the unique sound of each mode. Thus, Dorian modes
were "harsh", Phrygian modes "sensual", and so forth.
Elsewhere,[4] Plato,
indeed, talks about the proper use of various modes, the
Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, etc. It is
difficult for the modern listener to relate to that concept of
ethos in music except by comparing our own perceptions
that a minor scale is used for melancholy and a major scale for
virtually everything else, from happy to heroic music. (Today, one
must look at the system of scales known as ragas in India for a better comparison, a system
that prescribes certain scales for the morning, others for the
evening, and so on.)

The sounds of scales vary depending on the placement of whole
tones, they are C to D on a modern piano keyboard, and half tones,
which are C to C-sharp. Where modern Western music distinguishes
between relatively few kinds of scales, the Greeks used this
placement of whole-tones, half-tones, and even quarter-tones ("in
the cracks" on a modern keyboard) to develop a large repertoire of
scales, each with a presumed "ethos". It bears noting that even if
some things such as the perception of octave and fifth consonance
may be universal – or at least common among widely disparate
cultures – there is no strong evidence that the sequence of notes
in any given scale "naturally" corresponds to a particular emotion
or characteristic of personality. Yet, the Greek idea of the scale
(including the names) found its way into later Roman music and then
the European Middle Ages to the extent that one can find references
to, for example, a "Lydian church mode", etc. in
which the name is simply an historical reference with no
relationship to the original Greek sound or, especially, the
original Greek ethos.

A representation from the 1500s of the Muses dancing.

From the descriptions that have come down to us through the
writings of those such as Plato,
Aristoxenus[5] and,
later, Boethius,[6] we can
say with some caution that the ancient Greeks, at least before
Plato, heard music that was primarily monophonic; that is, music
built on single melodies based on a system of modes/scales,
themselves built on the concept that notes should be placed between
consonant intervals. It is a commonplace of musicology to say that
harmony, in the sense of a developed system of composition, in
which many tones at once contribute to the listener's expectation
of resolution, was invented in the European Middle Ages and that
ancient cultures had no developed system of harmony--that is, for
example, playing the third and seventh above the dominant, in order
to create the expectation for the listener that the tritone will
resolve to the third. Yet, it is obvious from the following excerpt
from Plato's Republic that Greek musicians sometimes
played more than one note at a time, although this was apparently
considered an advanced technique. The Orestes fragment
clearly calls for more than one note to be sounded at once. There
is also intriguing research[7] in the
field of music from the ancient Mediterranean-- decipherings of
cuneiform music script--that argue for the sounding of different
pitches simultaneously and for the theoretical recognition of a
"scale" many centuries before the Greeks learned to write, which of
course would have been before they developed their system for
notating music and recorded the written evidence for simultaneous
tones. All we can say from the available evidence is that, while
Greek musicians clearly employed the technique of sounding more
than one note at the same time, the most basic, common texture of
Greek music was monophonic.

That much seems evident from another passage from Plato:

...The lyre should be used together with the voices...the player
and the pupil producing note for note in unison, Heterophony and
embroidery by the lyre--the strings throwing out melodic lines
different from the melodia which the poet composed;
crowded notes where his are sparse, quick time to his slow...and
similarly all sorts of rhythmic complications against the
voices--none of this should be imposed upon pupils...[8]

Music in
society

Pan instructing Daphnis on the flute.

the Pan pipes, or syrinx.

The function of music in ancient Greek society was bound up in
their mythology: Amphion
learned music from Hermes and
then with a golden lyre built Thebes by moving the stones into
place with the sound of his playing; Orpheus, the master-musician and lyre-player,
played so magically that he could soothe wild beasts; the Orphic creation myths have
Rhea "playing on a brazen drum, and compelling man's attention to
the oracles of the goddess"[9]; or
Hermes [showing to Apollo] "...his newly-invented tortoise-shell
lyre and [playing] such a ravishing tune on it with the plectrum he
had also invented, at the same time singing to praise Apollo's
nobility[10] that
he was forgiven at once..."; or Apollo's musical victories over Marsyas and Pan.[11]

There are many such references that indicate that music was an
integral part of the Greek perception of how their race had even
come into existence and how their destinies continued to be watched
over and controlled by the Gods. It is no wonder, then, that music
was omnipresent at the Pythian Games, the Olympic Games,
religious ceremonies, leisure activities, and even the beginnings
of drama as an outgrowth of the dithyrambs performed in honor of Dionysus.[12]

It may be that the actual sounds of the music heard at rituals,
games, dramas, etc. underwent a change after the traumatic fall of
Athens in 404 b.c. at the end
of the first Peloponnesian War. Indeed, one reads
of the "revolution" in Greek culture, and Plato's lament that the
new music "...used high musical talent, showmanship and
virtuosity...consciously rejecting educated standards of
judgement." [13]
Although instrumental virtuosity was prized, this complaint
included excessive attention to instrumental music such as to
interfere with accompanying the human voice, and the falling away
from the traditional ethos in music.

Greek
musical instruments

Instruments in all music can be divided into three
categories,[14] based
on how sound is produced: string, wind, and percussion . (For
purposes of this description, we exclude electronic instruments.
For alternate systems of classification, see Musical instruments and Hornbostel-Sachs.) Within this system,
strings may be struck (ex: piano), bowed (violin) or plucked
(guitar). Wind instruments may be single mechanical reed (clarinet)
or double mechanical reed (oboe); also, wind instruments may be lip
reed (trumpet), air reed (flute), vocal-cord reed (voice) and
tuned, free reed (accordion). Percussion instruments may produce
either a definite pitch (bell) or an indefinite pitch (bass drum).
The following were among the instruments used in the music of
ancient Greece:

A later Roman representation of a woman playing the
kithara.

The hydraulis. Note the presence of the curved trumpet,
called the bukanē by the Greeks and, later, cornu
by the Romans.

the lyre: a strummed and
occasionally plucked string instrument,
essentially a hand-held zither
built on a tortoise-shell frame, generally with seven or more
strings tuned to the notes of one of the modes. The lyre was used
to accompany others or even oneself for recitation and song.

the kithara, also a strummed string instrument,
more complicated than the lyre. It
had a box-type frame with strings stretched from the cross-bar at
the top to the sounding box at the bottom; it was held
upright and played with a plectrum. The strings were tunable by
adjusting wooden wedges along the cross-bar.

the aulos, usually
double, consisting of two double-reed (like an oboe) pipes, not
joined but generally played with a mouth-band to hold both pipes
steadily between the player's lips. Modern reconstructions indicate
that they produced a low, clarinet-like sound. There is some
confusion about the exact nature of the instrument; alternate
descriptions indicate single-reeds instead of double reeds.

the Pan pipes, also known as panflute and syrinx (Greek συριγξ), (so-called
for the nymph who was changed into a reed in order to hide from Pan) is an ancient musical instrument based
on the principle of the stopped pipe, consisting of a series of
such pipes of gradually increasing length, tuned (by cutting) to a
desired scale. Sound is produced by blowing across the top of the
open pipe (like blowing across a bottle top).

the hydraulis, a keyboard instrument, the
forerunner of the modern organ. As the name indicates, the
instrument used water to supply a constant flow of pressure to the
pipes. Two detailed descriptions have survived: that of Vitruvius
[15] and
Heron of Alexandria[16].
These descriptions deal primarily with the keyboard mechanism and
with the device by which the instrument was supplied with air. A
well-preserved model in pottery was found at Carthage in 1885.
Essentially, the air to the pipes that produce the sound comes from
a wind-chest connected by a pipe to a dome; air is pumped in to
compress water, and the water rises in the dome, compressing the
air, and causing a steady supply of air to the pipes.[17]

In the Aeneid,
Virgil makes numerous references to the trumpet, most notably
having to do with Aeneas' comrade, Misenus: We can assume that the
Greeks and Trojans of whom Virgil speaks made use not only of the
conch — a sea shell with a cut opening as a mouthpiece — but even
of the brass trumpet ("...With breathing brass to kindle fierce
alarms...") or salpinx. A number of sources mention this
metal instrument (with a bone mouthpiece) and they appear in vase
paintings.